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@underdark wrote, in a much upvoted answer to the somewhat related Dealing with Q&As using deprecated/non-existent PyQGIS API functions?:

I'm not a friend of having ten copies of the same question for ten QGIS versions because it makes it impossible to find and maintain answers.

Today, Will core functions in QGIS exploit multi-threading?, first asked about QGIS 2.6, was re-asked for QGIS 3.0 as Will core functionality in QGIS 3.0 exploit multi-threading?

Irrespective of the current status of the newer question, what do you think should happen to it?

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Even though the well-written, and interesting, new question contains new information, I think what we are trying to achieve is to have a "timeless" question that can nevertheless have multiple answers posted for multiple versions, so that our combined knowledge over time about that question is collected as answers in the same place.

Ideally we would start with the "timeless" question that gets asked at a particular version, and then answers relevant to new versions can be added to it.

However, once the question has been re-asked, I think the action to take is to:

  1. Vote to close the new question as a duplicate of the old
  2. Perform any necessary editing to ensure that merging the questions will read as a "timeless" question with multiple answers that each clearly indicates the version(s) it refers to.
  3. Merge (or flag a moderator asking them to merge) the new question into the old
  4. Suggest the asker change their Accept checkmark to one about the later version, if that is the answer that now helps them the most, so that it may be brought to the top and be read first.

For the QGIS 2.6 and 3.0 questions linked at the beginning of this Meta question, I have already performed several small edits, to illustrate how the two Q&As may be made ready to be merged with minimal effort.

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  • +1 Should the qgis-2.6 tag be removed from the Q?
    – underdark Mod
    Jan 21, 2017 at 10:17
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    If you were to reduce this site to the "timeless" questions I suspect there would be fewer than a thousand left, because the vast majority of questions and answers are oriented toward specific software platforms that inevitably will change (and many will eventually disappear). Thus, although I approve and laud the implicit objective behind curating "timeless" questions, I think that is a pretension we have long ago given up.
    – whuber
    Jan 21, 2017 at 17:23
  • @whuber I use quotes around timeless for a reason. It is a pragmatic aspiration that I have certainly not given up on. Of course software architectures are bounded in time so by "timeless" I am suggesting that we should aspire to not be re-asking the same question within an architecture. I could not see that aspiration affecting more than about 5% of questions here, with most of those already having been closed as duplicates. This Q&A seeks to try and bring more clarity to how GIS SE can objectively avoid an obvious source of duplicates every time a new version is mooted or released.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Jan 21, 2017 at 19:09
  • @underdark I think what, if any version tags, should be applied to "timeless" questions, is best left to a separate Q&A, because they have a tendency to muddy otherwise clear discussion points. As always, the tags used are important, but I am keen to keep this Q&A focussed on examining a principle involved in preventing and dealing with a type of duplicate question.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Jan 21, 2017 at 19:37

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